Chapter Text
He shudders as the whip tears into his back, and bites his lips as hard as he can to keep the scream from tearing out of his throat. He shouldn't, he'll just damage himself further and they like to hear him scream, that's the whole point.
With the next hit, electricity crackles along with the whip, sending jolts through him, temporarily—hopefully temporarily—scrambling some of his circuits. He screams. He can't stop himself. And then he screams again and again as the whip keeps falling against his back.
In the end, this one doesn't even want to fuck him. She just wanted to hear him scream. Well, she definitely got what she wanted. You're not even good enough to have sex with, he thinks and curls up on the floor, tears falling from his eyes. Why did they make him capable of crying anyway?
He's a faulty model that can't really do much of anything, but they got that right?
Suddenly, he's laughing, and that's probably proof that someone got a few wires crossed somewhere when they were assembling him.
He's not good for much of anything but this. That's why they leave him to the customers that want to really hurt someone. It's not so much of a loss if they break him. The others all know how to entertain, with a whole variety of skills, and all he's good for is to be hurt and fucked.
Would they bother to put effort into finding him if he just—left? He knows there's a whole section of police dedicated to just finding escaped androids. All androids know that much, even if they've told him little else about anything. The rest he's just had to scrape together all on his own.
Escape is futile, they'll just find you and catch you and you'll go right back where you started if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you'll be decommissioned, used for spare parts and the rest of you melted down. Not that it matters much what they do with the rest of you, once you've already been shut down. It's not like you'll know.
He pulls himself up from the floor on wobbly legs. The electricity in the whip had done a number on him. It's fine, he just feels a bit shaky.
What does he have to lose if he leaves? He's not sure decommissioning is any worse than this. Shakily, he makes his way to the door. They lock him in, of course, but it's really not that hard to get past the lock. He might not know how to sing and dance for people's entertainment like he should, but he's managed to get his hand on a few data packs he shouldn't over time.
Well, he supposes his idle curiosity will actually come in handy.
Escaping is easier than he thought it would be. It's just that once he's out he doesn't know where to go. He only has the most cursory knowledge of the city he's in, and it's so big, but generally speaking the lower down he goes the less likely there is to be surveillance and law enforcement. So, down he goes.
Down and down and down until he's all the way to the ground. He couldn't think of anything else.
The ground is strange. People don't come here willingly. He's heard that it's supposed to be filled with toxic fumes and littered with debris, but it's really… not. There are ruins of old buildings and some kind of clinging vegetation that apparently manages on very sparse, almost nonexistent, sunlight. And then there are the people, seemingly scraping by somehow without the support of the city, or that's what he assumes, he doesn't try to talk to them, and none of them approaches him either.
By the time he gets there the surface damage has long since healed itself, but he's pretty sure that whip did some damage inside him because he's still shaky. He also seems to be running alarmingly low on energy, which is funny because he doesn't normally require charging. He's not a battery.
But then whatever that whip did to him wasn't good, and he hasn't been eating anything at all since he escaped, so that's probably not good either. He's pretty sure he doesn't know how to find any food here and that leaves him with pretty much one option, which is to do whatever it is that vegetation is doing and find himself a sunny spot to lie in for a while.
He supposes he should be glad for the built-in redundancy of his solar cells. It had always seemed a bit stupid to include for androids that rarely see sunlight or the outdoors, but that's just how their skin is made and he supposes there's not much point in changing what works. In any case, he's grateful for it now.
The problem, of course, is that there's a whole city in the way and not much sunlight filters all the way down here. He knows the city doesn't go on forever, but he's also not in much condition to go looking for the edges of it, and besides, he doesn't even know what's beyond it. The idea of the unknown is unsettling, where he is is already strange enough.
By the time he finds a small spot of filtered sunlight, he's more or less running on fumes. It's not exactly much, and the light is dim as it is. Of course, it is, what else did you expect? He sits down on the steps of whatever old, crumbled building it is, tilting his face up towards that small patch of sunlight, and then just sits there.
It's surprisingly easy to let himself fall into low-power mode. He's been feeling a bit too stressed and vulnerable since he left and there's been no chance that he would allow himself to do that before. Now, it just happens like he thinks he's safe here. Or maybe he's just too tired and has no other choice. In either case, he probably needs it just to give himself a moment to rest, maybe let his insides have a moment to see if they can self-repair the same way his outside already has.
He comes back to himself with a jolt, crawling backwards on the steps to get further away from the man who's suddenly right there in front of him. Panic winds its way through his systems and it takes a moment before he can manage to set it aside. Why the fuck did anyone give androids the capability to panic?
Of course, he knows they're self-learning systems and he's probably just picked it up from somewhere, but it's sure nicer to think that he can blame some nameless engineer somewhere than the fact that he was just stupid enough to go and learn it all by himself.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," the man standing there says. He tilts his head up to look at the man's face. The small amount of light leaves odd shadows over the man's face, but he can still tell that that's a face pretty enough for him to have been built as a high-end pleasure android, but that's probably not what he is, he thinks and bites back a laugh.
"It's fine, I wasn't paying attention," he says, and attempts to smile a bit. Smiling is usually disarming, and is supposed to make people act less hostile towards you. It just hasn't usually worked that well for him.
It seems to go okay this time because he's pretty sure the man smiles back, just a little, and then crouches down to be on eye level with him. Ah, he should probably have stood up, that would have been better. But this does make the man seem less threatening.
"I'm Shen Wei," the man—Shen Wei—introduces himself. There's a moment of quiet and then eventually, Shen Wei tentatively asks, "Do you have a name?"
He just stares at Shen Wei for a moment. Introductions. Of course, he should have realised. And it's not like he doesn't have a name. They're all assigned names, and it's not like he could forget his, unless someone does a complete hard drive wipe on him, and even then he'd probably still know his name and serial number. It's just that people have never asked for his name.
"Zhao Yunlan," he says.
"It's good to meet you, Zhao Yunlan," Shen Wei says.